Robert Delford Brown
From Philosopedia
Brown, Robert Delford (25 October 1930 - 24 March 2009)
Brown, who became a noted Dadaist in the anarchic New York art scene of the 1960s, was born in Portland, Colorado. When an adolescent, he moved with his family to Long Beach, California, and he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
A Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist, he moved in 1959 to New York City, becoming known as one of Neo-Dadaists who billed himself as “founder, leader, prophet, president, and saint of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc., at the Great Building Crack-Up.”
A versatile artist, he purchased a Greenwich Village building, had Yale architect Paul Rudolph “crack-up” the building by gutting it, then turned it into a combination studio and residence at 251 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011. Passersby saw “St. Ben Turpin” in the window of the “Chapel of Pharblongence” and observed a “Map of Nevada” on a terrace floor. Brown explained that instead of people futilely trying to get to Heaven or to Nirvana, he guaranteed to get them to Nevada: he painted a roadmap, using various art forms, and showed them where to catch a bus. In 1998 he sold the building, and the new owners removed all references to the “exquisite panic.”
Brown's work was exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art in Washington (1965), the Kansas City Art Institute (1971), the Rhode Island School of Design (1978), and the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (1992). Brown is author of Hanging (1967), Ulysses, An Altered Plagiarism (1975), and Teachings of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. (1991).
His entry in Who’s Who:
- I want the image to assume primary importance in all my work. Dazzling technique and established procedures are so often used not to enlighten but to obfuscate one’s vacuity. The artist’s responsibility is to tell the truth as he sees it, not to enhance his own self-importance as an expert, thereby perverting his responsibility as a moral force in society.
In 1963 he married Rhett Cone, who became his collaborator, muse, and financial backer. Mother of a daughter, Carol, she died in 1988. The couple had no children together. Upon her death, he wrote of them as "the first artist couple,"
- The most serendipitous event in my life was my meeting with Rhett Cone. She had founded the Cricket Theater on Second Ave. and Tenth St. where she showcased new material, presented Blanche Marvin's Merry Mimes children's theater, and produced and directed plays by such writers as Edward Albee, and Samuel Becket.
Brown, once a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York, when asked why religions were started, responded in a newyorkminute,
- Religions were invented because no one could figure out how to make money from philosophy.
In the early 2000s, Brown moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, to prepare for a 2008 exhibition of his work at the Cameron Art Museum there. He was known to have been looking for a place to have an art project in the river there, one that would involve a number of rafts. He had recently had hip surgery and walked with a cane. According to police officials, it is likely that he slipped, fell into the river, and drowned. His step-daughter, Carol Cone, is his only survivor.
(Expert with a Mac computer, he arranged unusual websites about Funkupaganism and the First National Church of Exquisite Panic, Inc., the latter a name for his art studio. Members of the church included dozens of his students, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Dennis Middlebrooks, and Warren Allen Smith. The church's manifesto was amusing and described its deity, Who. Asked what the future holds? "Who knows" was the answer.)
{WAS}
